When it comes to cute, humans easy to please / All part of nature's way to make us want to care for helpless infants, scientists say

Natalie Angier, New York Times

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, January 8, 2006

2006-01-08 04:00:00 PDT Washington -- If the mere sight of Tai Shan, the roly-poly, goofily gamboling masked bandit of a panda cub now on view at the National Zoo, is not enough to make you melt, maybe the crush of human onlookers, the furious flashing of cameras, and the heated gasps of their mass rapture will do the trick.

"Omigosh, look at him! He is too cute!"

"How adorable! I wish I could just reach in there and give him a big squeeze!"

"He's so fuzzy! I've never seen anything so cute in my life!"

A guard's sonorous voice rises above the burble. "OK, folks, five oohs and aahs per person, then it's time to let someone else step up front."

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The 6-month-old, 25-pound Tai Shan -- whose name means "peaceful mountain" -- is the first surviving giant panda cub born at the Smithsonian's zoo. And though the zoo's adult pandas have long been among Washington's top tourist attractions, the public debut of the cub in December has unleashed an almost bestial frenzy. Some 13,000 timed tickets to see the cub were snapped up within two hours of being released -- and almost immediately began trading on eBay for as much as $200 a pair.

Panda mania is not the only reason 2005 proved to be an exceptionally cute year. Last summer, a movie about another black-and-white charmer, the emperor penguin, became one of the highest-grossing documentaries of all time. Sales of petite, willfully cute cars like the Toyota Prius and the Mini Cooper soared, while those of non-cute sport utility vehicles tanked.

Women's fashions opted for the cute over the sensible or glamorous, with low-slung slacks and skirts and abbreviated blouses contriving to present a customer's midriff as an adorable preschool bulge. Even the too big could be too cute. King Kong's newly reissued face has a squashed baby-doll appeal, and his passion for Fay Wray ultimately feels like a serious case of puppy love.

Scientists who study the evolution of visual signaling have identified a wide and still-expanding assortment of features and behaviors that make something cute: bright forward-facing eyes set low on a big round face, a pair of big round ears, floppy limbs and a side-to-side, teeter-totter gait, among many others.

Cute cues are those that indicate extreme youth, vulnerability, harmlessness and need, scientists say, and attending to them closely makes good Darwinian sense. As a species whose youngest members are so pathetically helpless they cannot lift their heads to suckle without adult supervision, human beings must be wired to respond quickly and gamely to any and all signs of infantile desire.

The human cuteness detector is set so low, researchers said, that it deems cute practically anything remotely resembling a human baby or a part thereof, and so it ends up including the young of almost every mammalian species; fuzzy-headed birds like Japanese cranes; woolly bear caterpillars; a bobbing balloon; even a colon, hyphen and closed parenthesis typed in succession.

The greater the number of cute cues that an animal or object possesses, or the more exaggerated the signals may be, the louder and more italicized are the squeals provoked.

Cuteness is distinct from beauty, researchers say, emphasizing rounded over sculpted, soft over refined, clumsy over quick. Beauty attracts admiration and demands a pedestal; cuteness attracts affection and demands a lap. Beauty is rare and brutal, despoiled by a pimple. Cuteness is commonplace and generous.

Observing that many Floridians have an enormous affection for the manatee, which looks like an overfertilized potato with a sock puppet's face, Roger Reep of the University of Florida said it shines by grace of contrast.

"People live hectic lives, and they may be feeling overwhelmed, but then they watch this soft and slow-moving animal, this gentle giant, and they see it turn on its back to get its belly scratched," said Reep, author with Robert Bonde of "The Florida Manatee: Biology and Conservation."

"That's very endearing," he said, "so even though a manatee is three times your size and 20 times your weight, you want to get into the water beside it."

Even as they say a cute tooth has rational roots, scientists admit they are just beginning to map its subtleties and source. New studies suggest that cute images stimulate the same pleasure centers of the brain aroused by sex, a good meal or psychoactive drugs such as cocaine.

At the same time, said Denis Dutton, a philosopher of art at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, the rapidity and promiscuity of the cute response makes the impulse suspect, readily overridden by the angry sense that one is being exploited or deceived.

"Cute cuts through all layers of meaning and says, Let's not worry about complexities, just love me," said Dutton, who is writing a book about Darwinian aesthetics. "That's where the sense of cheapness can come from, and the feeling of being manipulated or taken for a sucker that leads many to reject cuteness as low or shallow."

Advertisers and product designers are forever toying with cute cues to lend their merchandise instant appeal, monkeying with the vocabulary of cute to keep the message fresh and fetching.

This market-driven exercise in cultural evolution can yield bizarre if endearing results, like the blatantly ugly Cabbage Patch dolls, Furbies, E.T., Yoda. As though the original Volkswagen Beetle was not considered cute enough, the updated edition was made rounder and shinier still.

Whatever needs pitching, cute can help. A recent study at the University of Michigan showed that high school students were far more likely to believe anti-smoking messages accompanied by cute cartoon characters like a penguin or a polar bear than when the warnings were delivered unadorned.

"The kids expressed more confidence in the cartoons than in the warnings themselves," said Sonia Duffy, lead author of the report, which was published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

Madison Avenue may adapt its strategies for maximal tweaking of our inherent baby radar, but babies themselves, evolutionary scientists say, did not really evolve to be cute. Instead, most of their salient qualities stem from the demands of human anatomy and the human brain, and they became appealing to a potential caretaker's eye only because infants would not survive otherwise.

Human babies have unusually large heads because humans have unusually large brains. Their heads are round because their brains continue to grow throughout the first months of life.

Baby eyes and ears are located comparatively far down the face and skull. Baby eyes are also notably forward-facing, and all our favorite Disney characters also sport forward-facing eyes, including ducks and mice, species that in reality have eyes on the sides of their heads.

Baby movements are clumsy, an amusing combination of jerky and delayed, because learning to coordinate the body's many sets of large and fine muscle groups requires years of practice. On starting to walk, toddlers struggle to balance themselves between left foot and right, and so the toddler gait consists as much of lateral movement as it does any forward momentum.

The giant panda offers another case study in accidental cuteness. The giant panda specializes in eating bamboo. As it happens, many of the adaptations that allow it to get by on such a tough diet contribute to the panda's cute form.

Inside the bear's large, rounded head, said Lisa Stevens, assistant panda curator at the National Zoo, are the highly developed jaw muscles and the set of broad, grinding molars it needs to crush its way through some 40 pounds of fibrous bamboo plant a day.

The panda's distinctive markings add to its appeal: The black patches around the eyes make them seem winsomely low on its face, while the black ears pop out cutely against the white fur of its temples.